CHAPTER XIV.—State of the Country
—O'Driscol rivals Falstaff—Who Buck English was supposed to be.
M'Carthy, on finding that he had failed, in consequence of the disappearance of Finnerty, in developing the system which nurtured such cowardly and inhuman principles, now found it necessary, independent of all threats uttered against him, to return to college in order to prosecute his studies, and maintain the high position which he had there obtained by honors already won, and the general brilliancy of his answering. A kind of love-quarrel had taken place between himself and Julia Purcel, which, as is frequently the case, prevented him on the one side from giving, and her on the other, from receiving an explanation. The consequence was that they separated, each laboring under that yearning of the heart towards the other, which combines the most delicious sensations connected with the passion—tenderness disguised under an impression of offence, hope, uncertainty, and that awful anger that is never to forgive or change, but which, in the meantime, is furtively seeking for an opportunity to be reconciled, and vent its rage in kisses and in tears.
In the meantime, the state of the country was fast becoming such as had seldom, or perhaps never been recollected by living man. The confederation, conspiracy, opposition, rebellion, or what you will, had risen to a gigantic height. In point of fact, it ought rather to have been termed an unarmed insurrection. Passive resistance was the order and the practice of the day. The people were instructed by the agitators, or rather by the great agitator himself, to oppose the laws without violating them; a piece of advice which involved an impossibility in the first place, but which was as false in itself, as replete with dishonesty and imposture, as it was deceitful and treacherous to the poor people who were foolish and credulous enough to be influenced by it. We are not now assailing the Whigs for the reforms which they effected in the Irish establishment, because we most cordially approve of them. Nay, more, we are unquestionably of opinion that that reform was not only the boldest, the most brilliant, but the most just and necessary act of policy, which they ever offered as a boon to this country. But what we do blame them for is, that they should have suffered themselves to be kept in such gross ignorance of the state of the Irish church, as to allow its shocking and monstrous corruptions to remain uncorrected so long; that they should have allowed themselves to be baffled and imposed upon, and misled by the hypocritical howlings and fictitious alarms of the old Tory party, who, whenever they felt the slightest dread that the Irish Establishment would slip through their fingers, filled heaven and earth with prophetic denunciations against England, not forbearing to threaten the very throne itself with a general alienation of Protestant attachment and allegiance, if any of its worst and rottenest corruptions should be touched. No; the Whigs should have known the state and condition of the Irish church from clear and correct sources, and not have subjected the country to the pernicious and degrading consequences of a turbulent agitation. What is just in itself ought to be conceded to reason and utility, and not withheld until violence and outrage seem to extort it; for this only holds out a bounty to future agitation. Be this as it may, the whole country, at the period of which we write, was in a state of general commotion and tumult altogether unparalleled. Law was completely paralyzed, set at defiance, and laughed at. Large bodies, consisting of many thousands, traversed different parts of the country in open day, swearing every one they met to resist the payment of tithes in every way and in every sense. Many gentlemen, who had either paid it or been suspected to do so, or who had been otherwise obnoxious as landlords, or for strong party feeling, were visited by these licentious multitudes with an intention of being put to death, whilst the houses of several wealthy farmers, who had unfortunately paid the hated impost, were wrecked in the face of day. Nor was this all: men were openly and publicly marked for destruction, and negotiations for their murder entered into in fairs, and markets, and houses of entertainment, without either fear or disguise. In such a state of things, it is unnecessary to say that many lives were taken, and that great outrages were from time to time committed. Two or three clergymen were murdered, several tithe-proctors or collectors of tithe were beaten nearly to death; and to such a pitch did the opposition rise, that at length it became impossible to find any one hardy and intrepid, or, in other words, mad enough, to collect tithe, unless under the protection either of the military or police. Our friends, Proctor Purcel and his sons, were now obliged, not merely to travel armed, but frequently under the escort of police. Their principal dread, however, was from an attack upon their premises at night; and, as fearful threats were held out that such an attack would be made, Purcel, who, as the reader knows, was a man of great wealth, engaged men to build a strong and high wall about his house and out-offices, which could now be got at only through a gate of immense strength, covered with thick sheet-iron, and bound together by bars of the same metal, in such a way that even the influence of fire could not destroy it, or enable an enemy to enter.
With such a condition of society before us, it is scarcely necessary to inform our readers that the privations of the Protestant clergy were not only great, but dreadful and without precedent. It was not merely that their style of living was lowered or changed for the worse, but that they suffered distress of the severest description—want, destitution, and hunger, in their worst forms. First came inconvenience from a delay in the receipt of their incomes; then the necessity of asking for a longer term of credit; after this the melancholy certainty that tithes would not be paid; again followed the pressure from creditors for payment, with its distracting and harassing importunities; then the civil but firm refusal to supply the necessaries of life on further credit; then again the application to friends, until either the inclination or ability failed, and benevolence itself was exhausted. After this came the disposal of books, furniture, and apparel; and, when these failed, the secret grapple with destitution, the broken spirit, the want of food—famine, hunger, disease, and, in some cases, death itself. These great sufferings of a class who, at all events, were educated gentlemen, did not occur without exciting, on their behalf, deep and general sympathy from all classes. In their prosperity, the clergy, as a body, raised and spent their income in the country. They had been kind and charitable to the poor, and their wives and daughters had often been ministering angels to those who were neglected by the landlords or gentry of the neighborhood, their natural protectors. It is true, an insurrection exhibiting the manifestation of a general and hostile principle against the source of their support, had spread over the country; but, notwithstanding its force and violence, the good that they had done was not forgotten to them in the hour of their trials and their sorrows. Many a man, for instance, whose voice was loud in the party procession, and from whose lips the shout of “down with the blood-stained tithe!” issued with equal fervor and sincerity, was often known to steal, at the risk of his very life, in the dead hour of night, to the house of, the starving parson and his worn family, and with blackened face, that he might not by any possibility be known, pay the very tithes for whose abolition he was willing to peril his life. Nay, what is more, the priest himself—the actual living idolatrous priest, the benighted minister of the Scarlet Lady, has often been known to bring, upon his own broad and sturdy shoulders, that relief in substantial food which has saved the lives of more than one of those ungodly parsons, who had fattened upon a heretic church, and were the corrupted supporters of the mammon of unrighteousness. Here, in fact, was the popish, bigoted priest—the believer in transubstantiation, the denouncer of political enemies, the advocate of exclusive salvation, the fosterer of pious frauds, the “surpliced ruffian,” as he has been called, and heaven knows what besides, stealing out at night, loaded like a mule, with provisions for the heretical parson and his family—for the Bible-man, the convent-hunter, the seeker after filthy lucre, and the black slug who devoured one-tenth of the husbandman's labors. Such, in fact, was the case in numberless instances, where the very priest himself durst not with safety render open assistance to his ecclesiastical enemy, the parson.
In this combination against tithe, it is to be observed, that, as in all other agitations, whether the object be good or otherwise, those who took a principal part among the people in the rural districts were seldom any other than the worst and most unprincipled spirits—reckless ruffians and desperate vagabonds, without any sense of either religious or moral obligation to restrain them from the commission of outrage. It is those men, unfortunately, who, possessed of strong and licentious energies, and always the most active and contaminating in every agitation that takes place among us, and who, influenced by neither shame nor fear, and regardless of consequences, impress their disgraceful character upon the country at large, and occasion the great body of society to suffer the reproach of that crime and violence which, after all, only comparatively a few commit.
Our friend the proctor, we have already stated, had collected the tithes of three or four parishes; and it is unnecessary, therefore, to say, that the hostility against him was spread over a wide and populous district. This was by no means the case with O'Driscol, who was much more the object of amusement to the people than of enmity. The mask of bluster, and the cowardly visage it covered, were equally well known in the neighborhood; and as the Irish possess a quick and almost instinctive perception of character, especially among their superiors, we need scarcely say that they played off, on more than one occasion, many ludicrous pranks at his expense. He was certainly a man of great importance, at least in his own opinion, or if he did understand himself, he wished, at all events, to be considered so in the eyes of others. He possessed, however, much more cunning than any one would feel inclined to attribute to him, and powers of flattery that were rarely ever equalled. He was, in fact, one of the few men who could administer that nauseating dose, without permitting the person who received it to become sensible that he did so. He had scraped together some wealth by the good oldsystem of jobbing—had got himself placed upon the Grand Panel of the county,' and ultimately, by some corrupt influence at an election, contrived to have the merit of returning the government candidate, a service which procured him a magistracy. O'Driscol was very fond of magnifying trifles, and bestowing, a character of importance upon matters that were of the utmost insignificance. For instance, if a poor decrepit devil, starving in a hut, and surrounded by destitution and beggary, were to be arrested for some petty misdemeanor, he would mount his horse with vast pomp, and proceed at the head of twelve or eighteen armed policemen to make his caption. But, on the contrary, whenever any desperate and intrepid character was to be apprehended—some of those fellows like the notorious Ryan (Puck), who always carried a case of pistols or a blunderbuss about them, or perhaps both—-our valiant magistrate was either out of the way or had a visit from the gout—a complaint which he was very fond of parading, because it is one of aristocratic pretensions, but one, of which, we are honestly bound to say, he had never experienced a single twitch.
We have already stated that he had received a threatening notice, and attempted to describe the state of conflicting emotions into which it threw him. We forgot to state, however, that he had before received several other anonymous communications of a somewhat more friendly stamp; the difference between them being the simple fact, that the one in question was read, and the others of his own composition.
The latter were indeed all remarkable for containing one characteristic feature, which consisted in a solemn but friendly warning that if he (the magistrate) were caught at a particular place, upon a particular day, it might be attended with dangerous consequences to himself. Our magistrate, however, was not a man to be frightened by such communications; no,—He was well known in the neighborhood, and he would let the cowardly scoundrels feel what a determined man could be. He thought his daredevil character had been sufficiently known; but since it seemed that it was not, he would teach them a lesson of intrepidity—the scoundrels. His practice was, on such occasions, to get a case of pistols, mount his horse, and, in defiance to all entreaty to the contrary, proceed to the place of danger, which he rode past, and examined with an air of pompous heroism that was ludicrous in the extreme.